NYC Bird Alliance Publications Committee | November 5, 2025 

As the last of our migrants fly south, we offer three new titles to help pass the time until colorful warblers and vibrant vireos return to our parks and gardens. Whether you’re looking to learn about local wildlife and New York birders, or travel to Sussex and attend “Bird School,” the pages of these books will keep you warm until spring. 

The Brooklyn Bird Club introduced Ryan Goldberg to birding in 2016 and he has been captivated ever since, season after season. Bird City is his engaging memoir, filled with intimate tales of his explorations of some of the City’s surprisingly wild areas and the vast variety of birds that visit them. Not to mention some equally remarkable birders. 

At the break of day during spring migration, Goldberg’s at Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula with Doug Gochfeld, a birder known for split-second identification by sight or sound. There’s a Black-and-white Warbler, an Ovenbird, and a variety of warblers popping out of the dunes. One summer day, Goldberg travels to Freshkills Park, formally a trash dump, on the west shore of Staten Island, one of the few remaining urban tall-grass prairies in the country. He sees five species of sparrows while “Indigo Buntings and American Goldfinches sang from roadside shrubs,” he reports.

September 11, 2023 finds Goldberg at the annual Tribute in Light Memorial, honoring the lives lost on 9/11. He’s with NYC Bird Alliance staff and volunteers assigned to count the number of birds in danger from the powerful lights. When an estimated 1,000 birds circle tirelessly in the beams or fly too low, Dr. Dustin Partridge, NYC Bird Alliance’s Director of Conservation and Science, asks the Tribute organizers to briefly turn off the lights so the birds can continue safely on their migration journey. That same night, at 4:30 am, it’s time for Goldberg to join Melissa Breyer, a Project Safe Flight volunteer, as she gathers the latest victims of collisions, caused by the buildings’ reflective glass.

Project Safe Flight is NYC Bird Alliance’s volunteer collision-monitoring program, and Goldberg joins Melissa that morning on her circuit, which includes four World Trade Center buildings. He finds her lifting a dead Black-and-White Warbler. Soon they discover a stunned Ovenbird. Next, a dead Common Yellowthroat. 

Goldberg shares the inspiring evolution of Project Safe Flight. When Melissa joined in 2020, there were 30 volunteers. Now? More than 200. In 2023, NYC Bird Alliance’s advocacy action, bolstered by much public support and moving testimony from PSF volunteers, the New York City Council passed Local Law 15, requiring all new structures—from store fronts to skyscrapers—to install bird-friendly materials on their reflective glass to reduce collisions.

Bird City will appeal to those already familiar with the city’s “wildness” or beginners who’ll be amazed by the possibilities.

— Carol Peace Robins, NYC Bird Alliance Publications Committee 

Adam Nicolson had never paid much attention to birds until he stopped and picked up a dead raven lying on a mountain road. The bird had been shot, he writes, “yet the midnight blue of its back and wing, shimmered in my hands […] The bird felt like a miracle of construction.”

“That moment of closeness to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.”

In Bird School, Nicolson, who has written many award-winning books on nature, history, and literature, decided to build a small shed in an overgrown field on his farm in Sussex, England. Outfitted with birdfeeders, nesting boxes, and bird-friendly windows, his “absorbatorium,” as he refers to it, is where Nicolson learns about birds.

He spent over two years, sometimes sleeping in the shed, getting to know where birds nest, how and why they sing, and their relationships with other birds and humans. His hope? To “dissolve, if such a thing is possible, the boundary between self and the world.”

The result is a  “bird school” filled with science, philosophy and literature about the most ordinary birds that will intrigue all birders, both new and advanced.

When a wren, escaping the cold winter, took shelter in the shed, Nicolson observed “the wren’s spectacular life drive”—a drive Shakespeare wrote of in King Lear. In his chapter on robins, Nicholson notes that the idea that birdsong was a male phenomenon was finally overthrown when women ornithologists entered the field: “More than 70 percent of female birds are now recognized as singers.”  

Beethoven gets into the act as well. Recently, a concert pianist after hearing young blackbirds sing, correctly determined that the composer had heard them as a youth in Germany, wrote down the motifs, and used them decades later when he wrote the Grosse Fuge Op 133 in 1825-27, when he was deaf in Vienna. Nicolson visited the German city of Bonn 250 years later, where blackbirds still sang the same rhythms. 

In the chapter “Ravens: Thinking,” the author notes that recent research shows that ravens were the first animal to live with humans in 28,000 BCE—and we have been very aware of them ever since. “If we were birds, we would be ravens,” writes Nicolson. “Like them, we are both solitary and sociable, independently clever, playful, fierce, territorial, loyal to our family and deceitful of others.” 

In closing chapters, he details the stunning decline in bird populations, due to habitat destruction, climate change, corporate agriculture, and, with hope, suggests how we might help with more thoughtful, ecological stewardship.

— Suzanne Charlé, NYC Bird Alliance Publications Committee 

One has only to heft Wild NYC to realize that it’s not a field guide to stuff in your pocket while walking around Central Park. Instead, its luxurious production has resulted in a weighty tome more suitable for relaxed indoor reading. But so has its content, with chapters like “New York History” and entries for any species you’re likely to happen upon, including plants and fungi, as well as all kinds of animals.

But you have to leaf through the pages to find bizarreries like the music to the “Hymn to Mycology”—the theme song for the New York Mycological Society—to say nothing of the plethora of wonderful photographs and, most especially, the witty drawings of maps and all sorts of creatures that pop up throughout the book. I especially liked the page of household pests that accompanies the discussion of cockroaches (Order Blattodea). As proof of its up-to-datedness, the book even has a drawing of the Spotted Lanternfly.

So as the days grow shorter and your time spent indoors longer, pick up Wild NYC by NYC Bird Alliance bird guide Ryan Mandelbaum to learn about areas of the City you haven’t yet gotten around to checking out, and to study up on species your concentration on birds has led you to ignore. And before you know it, spring migrants will be arriving in the parks again.

And by the way—the book would make a wonderful gift for anyone wanting to know more about the city, birder or not.

— Mary Jane Kaplan, NYC Bird Alliance Publications Committee